The microvideo platform TikTok has emerged as a popular hub for self-expression and social activism, particularly for youth, but use of the platform’s affective affordances to spread awareness of important issues has not been adequately studied. Through an exploratory multimodal discourse analysis of a sample of popular climate change-hashtagged TikTok videos, we examine how affordances of visibility, editability, and association facilitate the formation of affective publics on TikTok. We describe how TikTok’s features allow creators to construct and propagate multi-layered, affect-laden messages with varying degrees of earnestness, humor, and ambiguity. Finally, we identify recurring affective themes in popular climate change messages by studying not just in-frame content but also the discursive, intertextual, and memetic linkages that propagate affective publics. Collectively, these audiovisual expressions of personal engagement and awareness demonstrate how media affordances can abet, amplify, and confuse discussions of global issues online. These affordances facilitate a unique kind of activism by helping non-expert users intervene in a discussion that generally takes place among scientists and journalists: the question of how serious a problem climate change is and what to do about it.

微型视频平台TikTok已成为自我表达和社交活动的流行中心，尤其是对于年轻人而言，但尚未充分研究如何使用该平台的情感能力来传播对重要问题的认识。通过对流行的带有气候变化标签的TikTok视频样本进行的探索性多模式话语分析，我们研究了可见度，可编辑性和关联性的承受能力如何促进TikTok上情感公众的形成。我们将描述TikTok的功能如何使创作者以不同程度的热情，幽默和歧义来构建和传播充满情感的多层消息。最后，我们不仅通过研究框架内的内容，而且还研究话语，互文，和传播情感公众的模因联系。总的来说，这些个人参与和意识的视听表达方式表明，媒体能力如何能够教a，扩大和混淆在线对全球问题的讨论。这些能力通过帮助非专业用户干预科学家和新闻工作者之间通常进行的讨论来促进一种独特的行动主义：气候变化问题的严重性以及如何处理的问题。